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Marriage and husbands mean 7 hours
of extra housework for women
14 April, 2008: Husbands
create an extra 7 hours of housework
each week for wives, says a study.
Researchers at the Institute for
Social Research at the University of
Michigan, the United states, have come
to the conclusion that, for a woman,
having a husband creates seven hours
of extra housework. But, having a wife
saves the husband an hour of housework
each week.
In a statement, Frank Stafford, of the
University of Michigan’s Institute for
Social Research, who led the study,
said, “It is a well-known pattern.
There is still a significant
reallocation of labor that occurs at
marriage – men tend to work more
outside the home, while women take on
more of the household labor. And, the
situation gets worse for women when
they have children.”
The study is a long-term one that has
been going on at the University of
Michigan’s Institute for Social
Research since 1968. However, the
current data on marriage and housework
for men and women is based on
time-diary data compiled in 2005.
The diaries were analysed to
understand how much time was spent by
men and women doing basic housing
chores, including cooking and
cleaning, after marriage.
The researchers, who examined diaries
to evaluate how people spent their
time and questioned men and women
about how much time they spend
cooking, cleaning and doing basic work
around the house, found that young
single women did the least amount of
housework – that is, about 12 hours a
week.
While married women in their 60 and
70s did nearly twice that amount of
housework, after marriage and three
kids, a woman was found to spend 28
hours a week doing household chores,
while their husbands did housework for
just 10 hours.
The study, funded by the federal
government of the United States,
revealed that men did much more work
after marriage and the amount of work
seemed to go up as they got older.
The study also showed that, in 1976
women did an average of 26 hours of
housework a week, while men did about
6 hours of housework a week.
Even as it is commonly accepted that
marriage does bring more work for
women, the researchers at the
Institute for Social Research at the
University of Michigan claim that
their study is the first one to
quantify exactly how much extra load
marriage means in terms of basic
housework, the statement said.
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